Micallef - Truancy

A little humour to lighten the educational day...

A college of dreams

By Hannah Edwards
May 21, 2006

Vision ... Pastor Ray Minniecon, left, and headmaster Phillip Heath.
Photo: Jacky Ghossein

ONE of Australia's oldest private schools plans to establish a school for Aborigines to try to raise education standards among indigenous children.

The school will be built in Redfern or Waterloo, with assistance and guidance from St Andrew's Cathedral School.

The curriculum will be designed for Aborigines but the co-educational school, which could begin operating as early as the start of the 2007 school year, will be open to all students.

The school is expected to offer the NSW Board of Studies' curriculum, plus a strong focus on Aboriginal culture, arts and languages. The school will be funded by what the headmaster of St Andrew's, Phillip Heath, described as a "World Vision notion", with each student sponsored by either the NSW Government, a corporation or a private individual, at a cost of between $8000 and $10,000 a year. He is confident there will be no shortage of sponsors.

"I think there is a tremendous national conscience on this issue; to invest in a life and give students an education and keys to unlock their future," Mr Heath said. "We want children to reach benchmarks and certain standards. Not in terms of behaviour, although I think that will follow, but in terms of literacy and numeracy, following the set NSW Board of Studies curriculum."

The school will have an initial enrolment of about 50 children, in classes from kindergarten to year eight, and students will wear a uniform.

Mr Heath came up with the plan after being inspired by a sponsorship scheme he saw in South Africa last year. In one school, the students' fees were paid by a goldmining company.

"My mind turned not to raising money for sending shiploads of textbooks to Africa, but rather to our own situation inside our own city," Mr Heath said. "The lingering memory of the Redfern riots and the tremendous social disadvantage that our indigenous population has made me think the best contribution that we could make as a school would be to support indigenous education."

This will be a new style of schooling that Mr Heath hopes will inspire a network of similar schools throughout Australia. "We want to meet the [educational] outcomes but we want to deliver our school quite differently. It's a totally different model. It has to be."

Three potential inner-city sites are under consideration and Mr Heath hopes land will be donated by the NSW Government or the Anglican Church. The school will be self-contained but there will be an exchange of some staff and resources such as technology and books.

Students will receive a spiritual message, Mr Heath said. "As a Christian school, we would offer a Christian story as the context in which this happens. That would be something people would need to respect."

Pastor Ray Minniecon, the director of Crossroads Aboriginal Ministries in Redfern, has been a key community contact and says most people are positive about the idea. "We're not trying to be competitive with other schools," he said. "We are just trying to do something that is unique."

Tests put year 10 certificate in doubt

By Anna Patty Education Editor
May 22, 2006

THE year 10 School Certificate will become irrelevant under a system of national testing and should be scrapped, high school principals and Catholic education chiefs say.

The Federal Government has this month taken its first steps towards a national year 12 certificate, which would replace all state and territory qualifications.

From next year the Government also plans to introduce national tests for literacy and numeracy in year 9. These will be similar to external tests given in year 10 for the School Certificate.

The move has led to the president of the Secondary Principals Council, Chris Bonnor, labelling the year 10 credential moribund.

"The School Certificate is a dead man walking," Mr Bonnor said. "NSW is the only state that has external testing for a year 10 leavers' certificate.

"The coming Commonwealth benchmark testing for year 9 is going to make it superfluous."

The executive director of the NSW Catholic Education Commission, Brian Croke, said the move towards national testing had placed the School Certificate under the microscope.

"The new national year 9 tests from 2007-8 force us to face a question that we have been avoiding in NSW for too long," Dr Croke said. "Whether we like it or not, we will have to look again at the purpose and place of the School Certificate."

The president of the NSW Teachers Federation, Maree O'Halloran, said the union supported a review of the School Certificate because more students remained at school until year 12.

"However, it is important to recognise that there are still students who leave school at the end of year 10," she said.

The state Minister for Education, Carmel Tebbutt, is now examining how NSW tests would work with proposed national exams for students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9.

She has appointed Professor George Cooney of Macquarie University to conduct the review. His report is due next month.

Ms Tebbutt said there would always be a need for an end-of-school credential at year 10.

"The NSW Government has no plans to abolish the School Certificate," she said. "I will look closely at Professor Cooney's recommendations with regards to the national assessment system."

The Opposition spokesman on education, Brad Hazzard, said the NSW School Certificate should be reviewed, but that Ms Tebbutt would not "rock the boat" before the election next March.

Behaviour Management

Rewriting the Rules of Behaviour Management...

Pre-service or Beginning teachers can find behaviour management to be their greatest concern. Sometimes it is hard to find a definite answer to solve behaviour management problems. Yet, it is one of those areas where it is hard to find a definitive “answer” from other teachers or even educational theorists.

The following article from The Age reports on a very interesting solution:

Rewriting the rules
August 15, 2005

Fed up with angst and bullying, Victorian schools are signing up for an innovative yet controversial system of discipline. Adrienne Jones reports. There’s a quiet revolution gaining momentum in our schools, with the potential to transform behaviour management.

Read the rest of the article here

Public Vs. Private Debate

Is Public Education Dying?

The following article looks at the “privatisation” of education. It argues that this movement is now inevitable, but asks us to consider what our response should be?

In Victoria, history will be made with recognition of a private contribution to the funding of state schools, although tuition will remain free. It will also be the first time that non-government schools will be subject to the same accountability requirements as government schools.

Those who maintain the view that “public” is synonymous with “state” will be defending a position that has no counterpart among countries with which Australia is traditionally compared. There is still little awareness that high-performing countries such as Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Britain and some parts of Canada have integrated their systems of state and non-state schools, leaving a small rump of truly private independent schools.

Henceforth, “public” should be defined in terms of a set of public values that include quality, access and choice, with a commitment to high levels of achievement for all students in all settings, with all schools together, regardless of ownership, contributing to the public good in terms of the wellbeing of the individual and the nation.

Read the rest of the article here

Welcome

Welcome to the pre-service teachers blog site, feel free to post and discuss any issues that you feel are relevant to the concerns of being a pre-service or beginning teacher.